Abstract
There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., hi how is ya?!!) could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children, adolescents and young adults in their text messages was related to poorer performance on tasks of grammatical knowledge, including translating grammatically unconventional text messages into standard English. We found that variance in the production of grammatical violations in naturalistic messages was inconsistently predicted by grammatical task performance. Specifically, primary school children who made poorer grammar-based spelling choices were more likely to make more grammatical violations in their everyday messages, and university students who failed to correct more grammatical errors in a given set of messages were also more likely to make such errors in their own messages. There were no significant relationships for secondary school students. We conclude that using unconventional grammar when texting is not a consistent sign of poor grammatical abilities, although there may be links between some aspects of grammatical skill and grammatical violations in text messages.
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Notes
There are some exceptions in which the present-tense form of a verb, unchanged in pronunciation in its past-tense form, can be spelled with an -ed or non-ed ending (e.g., spell → spelled or spelt). Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of verbs, whose base portion is pronounced the same in the present and past tense, take the regular -ed ending, and even 8- and 9-year-old children know this pattern (Bryant, Nunes, & Snaith, 2000).
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Acknowledgments
The study described here is part of a larger longitudinal project on grammar and text-messaging supported by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation (EDU/38640). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Lucy Hart, Neelam Nagra, Christopher Reynolds, Mary Thompson, Viki Petkova, and Sapna Halai, as well as the support of the participants and schools involved. Thanks to Hélène Deacon for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Kemp, N., Wood, C. & Waldron, S. do i know its wrong: children’s and adults’ use of unconventional grammar in text messaging. Read Writ 27, 1585–1602 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9508-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9508-1